Anna G Morse's Projects

BFA Alumni

Major: Textile & Fashion Design

Graduation Year: 2018

Artist Statement:

People in all strata of society use clothing to perform self. I make garments and fabrics that reference constructed identity through repetitive textile processes.
I investigate ‘self’ through a temporal lens, looking at prehistoric craft disciplines and the human capacity for symbolic display with my main medium-- textiles and fibers. Importantly, I create many of the textiles, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and more. Processes such as weaving lead to fabrics that take weeks to produce and only minutes to cut to pieces.
My work is tied to my experience as a queer individual, and the ensuing search for identity when the ‘conventional’ narrative has failed you. Humans appropriate their past, materially, mythologically, and then construct themselves in the present based on incomplete assessments of times gone.
Through accumulation, weight, and materiality, I am exploring how people create an identity from the frameworks surrounding them, and the potential of textile as text- that is to say, an implicit narrative with which we wrap ourselves. My garments are a rejection of the hard line between past and present, the comfort of nostalgia and painful histories. Throughout human history societies have used social symbols to display status, identity, and purpose without need for words.

Biography:

Anna Morse is a textile artist currently residing in New England. Having received a BFA in Textile and Fashion Design from Maine College of Art in 2018, Morse’s practice incorporates garment design, textile explorations, and illustration. People in all strata of society engage in clothing as a performance of self. Their goal as a maker is to create garments both functional and performative in nature, that emphasize both the fragility and strength of their wearers-- symbolically linking them with the spaces they move through. Clothing is an important mediator in both natural and interpersonal landscapes. References to archaeology and natural landscapes lend a biographical touch to their work. At present, their work explores notions of identity and how histories both real and imagined inform the construction of these identities; garments and textiles that are worked by hand as a love letter to slow fashion and the meditative processes of craft.